the_mysterious_mr_enterfandomcom-20200214-history
Improving my RPG
So yeah, I'm going to remake it! Yay. I took a look through the reviews of my game, but I didn't see any inclination of them finding Lillith, and getting to the first dungeon. That doesn't discredit them, it just means that there are some areas I don't have an outsider's perspective. But with my own matured perspective and some outside advice I think I know part of what to do. And yeah, some help would definitely be appreciated. When I asked for help I had more sprite-work and music in mind, but a lot of people asked to do the writing. The writing is a lot more than just the story. It involves the dialog, item descriptions, and knowing what's funny or not. If you want to help on the story I've got a test for you: construct a humorous story with the set-pieces I have so far. Our main hero gets woken up, has to save a little girl in a nearby forest, and she leads him to the first dungeon where they slay a dragon and collect MacGuffin number one. Along the way they also meet a refugee. As for graphics. All of these need to be 4-bit (16 color) BMP, and be of these sizes: * Tilesets: 320x200. Each individual tile is 20x20. These are tiles like grass, water, dirt, etc. They can be layered so for things like flowers, bushes, etc. Spots on tiles can also be left blank to show the layer below. * Battle backdrops: 320x200. * Heroes: 32x40. These are the heroes' graphic in battle. Each palette is 16 colors, minus one for the background. Each hero needs a Standing graphic; a Stepping Graphic; an Attack A graphic; an Attack B graphic; A cast/use item graphic; a hurt graphic (please keep blood/gore to an absolute minimum); a weak graphic; and a dead graphic. * Small enemies: 34x34. These are the enemies' battle sprites. They don't change. Uses palettes * Medium enemies: 50x50. These are the enemies' battle sprites. They don't change. Uses palettes * Large enemies: 80x80. These are the enemies' battle sprites. They don't change. Uses palettes. * Walkabout: 20x20. These are used for every graphic that's not a tile, and each of them needs eight images, 2 for each direction. This not only includes characters and NPCs, but fire, chests, the fish-ripples, overhead enemies, basically anything that needs to move or change. Uses palettes. I'll of course do what I can when it comes to the graphics, but as what you've seen, doing what I can isn't much. Although I like what I've come up with since I've shown you guys that video (all except the water and the trees. I can't get them right for some reason, and I'm having a tough time with buildings. Once I get those done I can work on map builds). One area I can't do anything is music or sound effects. I mean the engine comes prepackaged with some public domain and royalty free music and sound effects, but I really don't want my characters hitting metal fish. The last area I'd need help with is quality assurance--basically people telling me when the fish has too much health. To be in Quality Assurance you need to have broad knowledge of SNES RPG's and have a feel of what's intuitive, what mechanics do and don't work, and anything resembling unfair difficulty spikes. Here's a few games to help you know what I'm going for. The more of these the better, along with any of these style RPG's that I haven't listed. * Chrono Trigger * Dragon Warrior III (Either the NES game or the SNES remake) * EarthBound * Evoland * Final Fantasy IV * Final Fantasy VI * Illusion of Gaia * Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (for dungeon design) * Lufia II * Secret of Evermore * Secret of Mana * Super Mario RPG * Terranigma And as for humor, I'd look into The Adventurers webcomic and Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale to help you know generally what I'm going for. Now we get into the fun part: separating my younger self's good ideas from his bad ideas. Tell me if I didn't do a good enough job. Lets start with one of the more baffling features: limited saves. Hey dude, this isn't a survival horror game. Having limited saves does nothing but maybe force your players to retread long segments of an already long genre type. If they were cheap and common it would make them pointless. That being said, what if the game had actual save points, but save crystals as well? There would be save points like your typical Final Fantasy, but you could also find/buy save crystals that allow you to save on the fly. Speaking of crystals, limiting revives doesn't exactly help the frustration either. Also, the first area probably shouldn't be a maze. That might have been responsible for the enemies fluctuating between too easy and too hard/having too much HP. If it is going to be a maze, it should be more like A Link to the Past's lost woods, rather than Super Mario RPG's Geno's Forest. I understand that you want to have a shit ton of secrets hidden, and that's another thing--having secret crystals is fine, but there's absolutely no reason to have them different colors which unlock different types of rewards. There should only be one item -- "Secret Crystal" or "Lost Gem" or whatever. The fishing and mining was definitely a nice touch though, but the way to entice a player is have them go past areas that could use a fishing rod or a pickaxe before they could buy one, which would entice them to continue. The areas look nice, but you can't slap them together without any planning. To get to the Ketmar Church, which there was no clue to its existence, I had to go the long way around the Inept Man's House. Speaking of that, self-aware =/= parody. It's not that the game was completely devoid of humor, but most of it didn't come from mocking the genre. The old man blocking the road was funny mostly because of how unexpected a joke was. Surprise is an incredibly important element of comedy, and by hammering in the same joke you remove any surprise and just create tedium. Making a humorous video game, especially a free form one, is difficult because you don't know which jokes your player had already activated. Now the enemies. First of all, in the forest there is absolutely no variety besides "slime," "big slime," or "lots of slimes." Unless you know you fish up a Malgo fish which never dies. I understand that you're trying to do a risk vs. reward in the water, but honestly any battle and lack of goodies that you get from fishing is a big enough punishment for failing what's essentially a slot machine. The fish don't need to take up the character's whole day and reward them with a scale, or a jelly which do nothing. It almost sounds like you were going to create a cooking/crafting mechanic. I don't know, maybe the jellies could have restored like 5 hit points or something. Totally useless in battle, but after grinding enough it would be useful outside of battle. And speaking of abilities, Kain's are pretty much useless with the exception of HP Sleuth, and Gallas' are pretty uninspired. You need to add some strategy to it. Take Twinstrike. If an enemy is immune/resistant to physical attacks, hitting it twice in one turn won't exactly do much. I won't exactly say give him elemental abilities, because that is Lillith's bread-and-butter, but each ability should do something that nothing else does or be an improved version of a previous attack. I mean, a purely stronger attack is better than Twinstrike. Last but not least, the dungeon design is very uninspired. The Ketmar Mines are a maze with no coherence or logic, there's nothing notable about the catacombs, and the volcanic cave seems like a half-hearted attempt to try to replicate a Zelda dungeon (need an item, find an item, use an item to reach the boss). Also, the mutiny joke would have been pretty funny... if you didn't encourage lack of saving. In conclusion I need to make these updates: * Change limited saves to Constant Save Points, with "Save Crystals" * Make "Revive Crystals" purchasable, or at the very least more common than a rare drop from a rare monster. * Put some coherence into the map design * Don't have the fishing pole or pickaxe in the first town. It works for a prototype, but give something for the player to strive for. * Change the forest design. Granted it shouldn't be a straight shot to Lillith, but make it a bit more reasonable than going down random holes and hope that you've gotten closer to your target... two minutes after you've started the game. * Merge all secret gems into one type. * Work on your dungeon design (it helps to plan it out in advance) * Fix your battle system. This one needs a few subpoints: * Add some enemy variety. The first area is a fucking forest. I'm not expecting the main character to get attacked by a manticore, but there should be more things living in it than just slimes or bigger slimes. Yeah I know that the next area has more enemies, but trust me, you could lose players before that point. * Make each new ability interesting or unique, or don't have them at all. Gallas is supposedly a fighter (although there's nothing in the narrative to support that), most warriors don't have special attacks. * CURB THE HEALTH ON THOSE FUCKING FISH * Even the most basic enemies need some semblance of strategy. General rule of thumb: the first time you meet a new enemy you should have to think to kill it, and it's generally a bad thing to have your player beat a boss on their first try * Have item drops do something. Make them healing items, soup ingredients, I don't care. Just for selling is not a use, unless they're a rare drop that can be sold for a lot of money. * Work on the humor. Don't make each NPC "hurr, I'm an NPC, laugh at how NPC I am" you NPC-racist. Give each of them their own unique personality that plays on their trope, like the Old Man in the cave, which really plays on the trope of the blocked road. I gotta say that that's much more interesting than a guy needing his coffee. Category:Miscellaneous